Havok announces today the official release of Havok 4.5, the latest update to its modular suite of artist tools and run-time technology. Fully optimized for Sony PLAYSTATION3, as well as Microsoft Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii, Havok 4.5 dramatically accelerates the development of cross-platform, cutting edge electronic games, meeting the needs of the world’s top developers and producers. Havok 4.5 allows game developers to scale game content to thousands of dynamically-driven game objects and characters, harnessing the full power and speed of next generation architectures.

Game developers using Havok Physics and Havok Animation products to develop for PS3 will be able to harness the full power of all the SPUs, while maintaining the complete flexibility of the Havok SDK. Havok architecture now scales strongly across all SPUs and runs between 5 and 10 times faster than Havok 4.0 for a typical game scene on the PS3.

“We made sure that we met our customers’ demand for a PS3 optimized version of Havok as soon as possible” says Havok CEO, David O’Meara. Comments Scott Kirkland, Technical Director at Evolution Studios and lead on PS3 exclusive title MotorStorm, “With its unparalleled environmental interaction and spectacular destruction, MotorStorm’s brutal, chaotic, off-road racing makes big demands on physics processing. Unphazed by the intense time pressures of our project, Havok rose to this next-gen challenge and provided us with an outstanding suite of professional tools, technology and support to help realize our vision. We’re now looking forward to collaborating with the Havok team on future Evolution products”.

Optimization for next generation platforms represents one of the largest development tasks ever undertaken by Havok. Havok 4.5’s tools and SDK are designed to be modular and open, so they can be integrated easily into existing production pipelines, reducing the overall iteration time needed to create immersive game-play experiences and special effects. The Havok 4.5 suite is backed by expert support and professional services, leveraging the experience of almost 200 commercially released Havok-powered game SKUs.

Adds Havok’s David O’Meara, “The launch of Havok 4.5 represents the culmination of many thousands of man hours for the Havok development team. We’ve worked really hard to ensure that Havok technology is optimized for the next generation console platforms, and we’ve been really excited by the results. Havok 4.5’s ability to allow developers to massively scale game content will make it possible to develop even more compelling, realistic and complex worlds that harness the full power of new generation architectures.”

Havok 4.5 enhances Havok’s industry-leading game-play physics and animation products (Havok Physics and Havok Animation). It also brings to new levels Havok Behavior, which accelerates development of sophisticated interactive character behaviors, and Havok FX, which delivers an unprecedented level of physically-based “special effects” phenomena. The combined 4.5 solution represents a best-of-class SDK and tool set that puts power and flexibility in the hands of today’s leading game developers.Source: Havok

12 Commentson Havok 4.5 Unleashed

Well, I think the Wii is likely to get left out when it comes to most multi-platform games. It doesn't have the same power as the PS3 and Xbox, so the graphics would need to be scaled down, although Havok may obviously be able to do that.

But I'm not complaining - the Wii is likely to have its own special genre of games, not the typical ones. Even if it does share part of a series, it will probably be like SSX Blur and be quite different to the other versions.

How would you know Wii is weaker? Nintendo don't like sharing what's inside - all we know is it's a PowerPC derivative CPU and an ATi GPU... Funnily enough, that sounds just like the 360... ;) I haven't looked for any 'Wii pulled apart' pages or anything though, which should have popped up by now. Last time I was looking for specs it hadn't been released yet.

Carcenomy said:How would you know Wii is weaker? Nintendo don't like sharing what's inside - all we know is it's a PowerPC derivative CPU and an ATi GPU... Funnily enough, that sounds just like the 360... ;) I haven't looked for any 'Wii pulled apart' pages or anything though, which should have popped up by now. Last time I was looking for specs it hadn't been released yet.

Carcenomy said:How would you know Wii is weaker? Nintendo don't like sharing what's inside - all we know is it's a PowerPC derivative CPU and an ATi GPU... Funnily enough, that sounds just like the 360... ;) I haven't looked for any 'Wii pulled apart' pages or anything though, which should have popped up by now. Last time I was looking for specs it hadn't been released yet.

Carcenomy said:How would you know Wii is weaker? Nintendo don't like sharing what's inside - all we know is it's a PowerPC derivative CPU and an ATi GPU... Funnily enough, that sounds just like the 360... ;) I haven't looked for any 'Wii pulled apart' pages or anything though, which should have popped up by now. Last time I was looking for specs it hadn't been released yet.

C'mon, I hope you didn't say this just to try to start an argument. Anyone can find specs on any newer console with no more than 5-15 minutes of research by using the machine that you wrote your stupid reply with. Try searching any console on the search engine of your choice and see what you find. Carcenomy, only YOU have the power!!!

I said that because even though Ninty deliberately set the res out of the Wii to 480p and no higher, it doesn't suggest anything about how fast the machine actually is internally. A CPU codename (especially an IBM one) doesn't tell you much.

I don't think it's terribly strange at all... all three utilize PowerPC architecture. It's not like the old days of one running an m68k, one running a MIPS and one running an Intel... they're all using IBM/Freescale processing systems that stem from the POWER line.

I still don't believe the Wii is too far off - unlike Microsoft and Sony who were having the old penis size comparison (much like American car manufacturers in the 70s) Nintendo have used the same base platform as the other two as far as CPUs go, and the same base platform as Microsoft as far as GPUs go.

In any roads, having infinite power even wouldn't make a console good - it's the games on it. Hell I still prefer games on a classic A500 than the terrible crap we have now. At least back then the code was clever to make the absolute most of the power at their disposal, and it was ALL about game play. It had to be FUN, not just pretty.